Alfred looks, for a moment, as if someone just tried to get him to drink the whiskey — full-on snakes-drink-by-demonstrating-they're-just-straws and everything — only for it to have gone up his nose, instead. (Assume, for the moment, just in case, that that isn't how they drink.)
«How much of this is because I'm the only one who never slept with any of them?» he demands, mostly of Pyrrha, but the laughter is leaking in around the edges of his voice, hinting that he's nowhere near as irate as his words could be indicating.
"That does seem likely to make you the least-prejudiced among us," his brother points out, managing to suppress his own laughter, if not the merriment in his eyes — or the momentary wary uncertainty, as his gaze flicks past Pyrrha's.
«Anyway, based on sheer volume, the answer is Valancy regardless.»
(Humblebraggart she was not — which doesn't even get into the —)
"You'll have seen Valancy and Cyrus in that painting Pyrrha put up on the door," Augustine adds, as a maybe-helpful aside to the quiet shrike. "And as for your question — I suppose you might have been either, at some point, but I'm not aware of you having had a permanent partner in your necromancy; it's almost as if you started out being told you should act as a Lyctor from the start, I think —"
Augustine falls silent, looking at him thoughtfully. Now, there's an idea, if he can just pin it down properly — something about that, about souls, about having extra that's always reaching for the River, about placement, and the Nephelian dead-and-undead, if he can just find it, buried somewhere within several thousand years' worth of memories of things that never really happened...
He needs another drink, is what he needs; he knocks back what's left of the whiskey in his hand as a start to it.
no subject
«How much of this is because I'm the only one who never slept with any of them?» he demands, mostly of Pyrrha, but the laughter is leaking in around the edges of his voice, hinting that he's nowhere near as irate as his words could be indicating.
"That does seem likely to make you the least-prejudiced among us," his brother points out, managing to suppress his own laughter, if not the merriment in his eyes — or the momentary wary uncertainty, as his gaze flicks past Pyrrha's.
«Anyway, based on sheer volume, the answer is Valancy regardless.»
(Humblebraggart she was not — which doesn't even get into the —)
"You'll have seen Valancy and Cyrus in that painting Pyrrha put up on the door," Augustine adds, as a maybe-helpful aside to the quiet shrike. "And as for your question — I suppose you might have been either, at some point, but I'm not aware of you having had a permanent partner in your necromancy; it's almost as if you started out being told you should act as a Lyctor from the start, I think —"
Augustine falls silent, looking at him thoughtfully. Now, there's an idea, if he can just pin it down properly — something about that, about souls, about having extra that's always reaching for the River, about placement, and the Nephelian dead-and-undead, if he can just find it, buried somewhere within several thousand years' worth of memories of things that never really happened...
He needs another drink, is what he needs; he knocks back what's left of the whiskey in his hand as a start to it.